The Scotiabank Convention Centre has been open just short of a year now, and on Friday night I had the opportunity to go for the first time. We went to see the Busytown Busy show with our kids. I’ll write about that later, but for now, here are a few thoughts.

• The convention centre is beautiful! I was actually quite surprised. I’ve been to a few other ones, and I kind of expected that this one wouldn’t be as nice as some of the others I’d been with, but I was wrong. It is gorgeous, and the limited part of the building that I saw was just as nice as any other one I’d been to.
• There is a huge parking lot behind the convention centre. I wasn’t sure if we’d be charged for parking or not. We were, but it was only $2. On the one hand, it seemed like it was so low, why did they bother (it kind of felt like they were charging us just because they could). On the other hand, no one had a problem handing over a Twoonie instead of a $10 bill.
• If you’ve seen the building, you know there are a lot of windows. It is great when you are inside to have all of the natural light coming in.
• My wife couldn’t put in to words what she thought of the place, other than it was clean and modern, and it made you want to be there.
• The performance we were there to see was in the Fallsview Theatre. I had heard previously about another show when there were audio problems, but on Friday the sound system was great. No complaints whatsoever.
• The chairs in the theatre were quite comfortable
• There was a surprising number of SCCN staff members around, and they were all very helpful

I took a few pictures while I was there. As always, you can see the thumbnails below, and you can view them along with larger versions of the photos in the Scotiabank Convention Centre in March 2012 gallery.